PC enthusiasts have been chomping at the bit to get news of Intel’s next generation of processors and yesterday we expected to here news of the new Coffee Lake family.
Sadly all we got was a teaser and four new Kaby Lake processors.
We say new but aside from being 8th generation instead of 7th generation, these processors differ very little from the older Kaby Lake processors.
Perhaps that is a bit harsh given that these processors are said to be 40% faster than the last generation, adding two cores and four threads to the U line up of processors for notebooks.
i7-8650U | i7-8550U | i5-8350U | i5-8250U | |
Base Clock | 1.9GHz | 1.8GHz | 1.7GHz | 1.6GHz |
Boost Clock | 4.2GHz | 4.0GHz | 3.6GHz | 3.4GHz |
Cores/Threads | 4/8 | 4/8 | 4/8 | 4/8 |
Memory Channels | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
Memory type | DDR4 2400/LPDDR3 2133 | DDR4 2400/LPDDR3 2133 | DDR4 2400/LPDDR3 2133 | DDR4 2400/LPDDR3 2133 |
GPU | Intel UHD 620 | Intel UHD 620 | Intel UHD 620 | Intel UHD 620 |
GPU Clock | 1 150MHz (Max) | 1 150MHz (Max) | 1 100MHz (Max) | 1 100MHz (Max) |
While a speed bump is nice (that 4.2GHz clock in the i7-8650U sounds lovely) as Ars Technica points out not much else has changed. Even the GPU on the chip is the same, albeit with a slick new name.
What about my desktop?
For those that are waiting for news on when you can upgrade your desktop, or start shopping for a new notebook, you’re going to have to wait a while longer.
Intel has said that news about desktop, enterprise and high-end notebook chips would be revealed in the North’s Fall (our Spring) but has not said much else.
Those that were hoping for a new Coffee Lake or Cannon Lake then CPU will have to wait a bit longer.